A premeditated green-on-blue attack in Jordanoutside of King Faisal Air
Base (at al-Jafr in Southern Jordan) late last year (2016) resulted in the
deaths of three elite US Green Berets in what the media initially dubbed
a mere unfortunate gate incident and what the Jordanian government dismissed
as a "a tragic accident devoid of any terrorist motives". But the whole
event and subsequent attempts at cover-up just as Obama was leaving
office enraged both the families of the slain and the US special forces
community; and it further threatened to blow wide open the CIA's illegal Syrian regime change operation, called Timber Sycamore,
which involved American special ops soldiers being tasked with training
so-called "moderate" Syrian rebels in Jordan and Turkeyas part of an
inter-agency program.

As details of the court case involving the shooter continue to emerge this week, the
media continues to misreport the true nature of the what the US special
forces personnel were doing in Jordan in the first place, and how a CIA
secret program put them at risk.

On Monday (July 17, 2017) a Jordanian military court sentenced the attacker, a
Jordanian soldier named Marik al-Tuwayha, to life in prison with hard
labor for the premeditated murder of [3 Green Berets:]

In Jordan a "life sentence" can mean the possibility of being set free after serving 20 years for good behavior.

Last November the three Green Berets were entering King Faisal Air Base assigned as part of the CIA's 'Timber Sycamore'
training. According to court testimony as well as evidence collected by
the Pentagon, a soldier in the US-allied Jordanian Army opened fire as
the Green Berets' convoy was stopped in front of the base. The Jordanian
guard fired for six minutes, reloading multiple rifle magazines. The
Jordanian government and media attempted to paint a picture that the
approaching US convoy charged the gate and neglected protocol, and that
the guard thought he was acting in self defense (a claim later retracted
by Jordan). Butinitially suppressed surveillance footage captured the entire event, and confirms a methodical and willed attack as the Americans yelled in English and in Arabic,"We're Americans!
We're friendly!"(the Jordanian military court refused to show the
footage). As Foreign Affairsreported,"they were hunted down and executed at close range." A fourth US soldier was able to wound the shooter, bringing the attack to an end. Crime scene photo evidence by the Army's official 15-6 investigation....

After Trump took office Staff Sgt. Kevin McEnroe's father published a letter askingthe new US president to "reconsider our relationship and aide to an ally who murders our soldiers and then lies about it."

Perhaps more significant is that the whole episode threatened to
expose never before known details of the ground level nuts and bolts of
how the CIA's program to destabilize and topple the Syrian government
worked.

While the program began to be the subject of vague references
in major US media in 2013, specific names and locations of military
units, persons, and places involved had never been known or understood
until just before and after the tragic attack in Jordan. Even as of
2014, as reports and rumors
of CIA training camps in Jordan's vast deserts were abundant, and as
some enterprising journalists literally stumbled around Jordan looking for the whereabouts, locations and details remained a complete mystery.

Training Jihadists for Syria Operations: Whistleblowers Speak

One month before the attack at King Faisal Air Base, a Green Beret
associated with covert operations in Syria spoke out to a prominent
military news site called SOFREP, blowing the whistle on details surrounding theCIA's use of jihadists to overthrow Assad:

"Nobody believes in it. You're like, 'F--k this.' Everyone on the ground knows they are jihadis. No one on the ground believes in this mission or this effort, and they know they are just training the next generation of jihadis, so they are sabotaging it by saying, 'F--k it, who cares?'The lengthy whistleblowerreport (member restricted) circulated widely among special forces veterans and professional analysts,
but never reached a broader public audience and was ignored in
mainstream press as it sat behind a members only access site founded by a well-known Navy Seal
for the purpose of 'insider' news and discussion impacting the special
forces community. The report revealed that American Syrian rebel
trainers (in Jordan and elsewhere) belonging to the Army's 5th Special Forces Group
had been tasked with assisting a CIA covert mission,but they knew full
well that they were being ordered by the Obama administration to train
jihadists and ISIS sympathizersin the push to topple the Syrian
government. They warned blowback was coming asthe CIA was violating America's own counter-terror laws....

Media figures like CNN's Clarissa Ward immediately attacked the report (Ward herself is a notorious regime change apologist),
but SOFREP's reputation is as one of the few outlets in the world with
direct access to covert and special operatives on the ground in remote
places. Its two co-founders appear semi-regularly on Fox News and other outlets to discuss
their investigative stories. Indeed SOFREP's team of journalists is
made up almost entirely of former career intelligence and military
operatives. The site's editor-in-chief, Jack Murphy, joined a group of high profile journalists last year which sat in a closed door interviewwith Syrian President Assad - among them were the New York Times
regional bureau chief, a journalist from The New Yorker, and analysts
from The Century Foundation.

SOFREP's bombshell report was the result of months, and even perhaps years of a firestorm of controversy within military and intelligence ranks. Some members of the 5th Special Forces Group felt as if they were being used as pawns ("de facto
expendable assets" as the SOFREP investigation describes it) by CIA
bureaucracy in a legally and constitutionally questionable scheme that
involved the US actively teaming up with jihadiststo fight in Syria.

While a general Western policy of using Islamic terrorism to
pressure the Assad government has not been a secret in recent years,
especially since the 2012 DIA 'salafist principality' memo
came to light, details of how it all worked and how its overseers
attempted to justify training jihadists have remained unknown.

Below are excerpts broken into sections from SOFREP's multi-part investigation (member restricted) into the joint CIA/Army Special Forces ("inter-agency") program.
The total investigative series includes some 30+ printed pages of
program history and details. It is unclear to what extent various
elements of the program remained in place after Trump took office....

The slaying of three Green Berets comes after years of the Special
Forces soldiers assigned to the CIA's Timber Sycamore program
complaining that the moderate rebels they had been sent to train were
actually ISIS and al-Nusra infiltrators. The vetting that the
CIA does of the rebels is dubious at best, consisting of bio-metric
trace searches in old databases which are far from comprehensive.
The Special Forces soldiers have repeatedly brought up the fact that
the rebels they have to train have also failed their polygraphs and
display allegiances to Islamists during interviews.Such concerns have
also been expressed by the CIA's para-military component, called Ground
Branch, which have also gone ignored.

*****

The shooter was an [Jordanian] Air Force soldier who came from the city
of Ma'an, a hotbed of Islamic extremism. Ma'an is known to be a city
openly sympathetic to the Islamic State, and the black flag of ISIS has
been flown over the city despite crackdowns by Jordanian Special
Operations troops.

*****

As of now, three 5th Group members killed outside a CIA base in Jordan by a Jihadist sympathizeris not enough to get Congress asking questions about what is really going on with these programs.

*****

CIA officers, particularly the station chief in Turkey, are known to
routinely blow off the concerns of the Special Forces sergeants. The CIA
has a careerist culture in which numbers have to be met in order for
their officers to be eligible for promotion, therefore the mission takes
second place to checking tick marks on a ledger. Special Forces
trainers complain that they were taking on too many rebels for them to
control, and that many were actually terrorists.Requests from the Green
Berets for a security elementfrom the Ranger Regiment to guard the
rebels were dismissed. The CIA blew off any and all concerns that the
Green Berets had

leading many of the trainers to actively sabotage the
programs by passively refusing to train rebels that they know are
actually terrorists. Some senior CIA staffers stayed away from the
mission entirely, believing that the eventual blowback would be enough
to destroy their careers.

*****

"A good 95 percent of them were either working in terrorist
organizations or were sympathetic to them," a Green Beret associated
with the program said, adding,"A good majority of them admitted that
they had no issues with ISIS and that their issue was with the Kurdsand
the Syrian regime."Like the militias being trained in Jordan,
the rebels being trained in Turkey were not ready for combat. "It is
not in their blood to be fighters. A large majority of them are
criminals,"a Green Beret said. Many were foreign fighters, some from
Iraq. One even turned out to be a Lebanese drug smuggler.

"The majority of these guys have been coached on what to say at the
training site and give cookie-cutter answers," the Special Forces
soldier told SOFREP. They would portray themselves as being secular, but
the Americans could tell who the hardliners were because they didn't
smoke (jihadis follow Wahhabi Islam, which does not permit it) and
looked at the Green Berets with disdain.

and Saudi intelligence
services. The reality is that the FSA is little more than a cover for
the al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra.

2) The CIA merely watched ISIS grow as its top priority had always been regime change in Syria:

CTC [CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center] "didn't even track ISIS worth a damn,"
a CIA officer said. Amazingly, ISIS remained in the background,
regarded by CIA leadership as little more than another insurgent group.
The director of CTC, who had once been chief of station in Baghdad, did
not care about Iraq one way or the other according to multiple sources
in CTC who spoke to SOFREP confidentially. Since this was the party line
held by the CTC director, it filtered down through the lower ranks in
the CIA. In Syria, the overwhelming priority for the CIA is what some
CTC officers call Director John Brennan's baby: the removal of the Assad
regime.

*****

In 2012, with the Syrian Civil War already well underway, CIA Case
Officer Doug Laux was dispatched to the Middle East in order to meet
with allied nations and the leadership of the so-called Free Syrian Army
(FSA). The mission was to "achieve the desired result of removing
President Bashar al-Assad from power," as Laux wrote in a memo. "Leadership
on the seventh floor [of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia] and the
White House had made it clear from the beginning that the goal of our
task force was to find ways to remove President Assad from office,"
the former CIA officer wrote in his memoir. Large sections of Laux's
book are blacked out by CIA censors, but what we do know is that
American-made TOW anti-tank weapons began showing up in offensives waged
by the FSA in Syria.

*****

Brennan was the one who breathed life into the Syrian Task Force, which
was able to draw upon resources from CTC/SI. "John Brennan loved that
regime-change bullshit," a former CIA officer commented. CTC/SI focuses
on counterterrorism, while the Syrian Task Force conducts espionage,
influence operations, and paramilitary activities in conjunction with
the Special Activities Division (SAD) as needed in pursuit of regime
change, including the covert arming of militia groups [terrorists] inside Syria.

3)Advanced weaponry went to al-Qaeda in Syria:

Weapons were provided to the FSA by the CIA under US Code Title 50,
which authorizes the CIA to conduct covert operations, including the
supply of arms to foreign proxy forces, after receiving permission from
the White House via a presidential finding. In 2014, it became perfectly
clearthat U.S.-supplied TOW missile launchers had fallen into the
hands of Jabhat al-Nusra, an al-Qaeda-affiliated group in Syria.

*****

Concerns about the so-called moderate rebels have been brought up time
and time again by the Special Forces trainers. Even the much lauded and
allegedly successful program to arm the rebels with TOW missiles has
proved to be a failure. Soon after the the TOWs were delivered, ISIS
raided the storage facility where they were kept, the CIA-trained rebels
abandoning their own weapons systems.Even the TOWs that remain in
moderateFSA (Free Syrian Army)rebel hands end up benefitting the likes
of the Al Qaeda affiliated al-Nusra. When a moderate FSA members fires
TOW missiles in an offensive and takes new ground, that terrain is
quickly ceded to al-Nusra,as moderate opposition groups are too weak to
hold it.

The legalities in arming groups which are designated as Foreign
Terrorist Organizations by the State Department are murky and
complicated. If the orders are written the "right" way and lawyers are
in sync at the White House and Department of Justice, they can be signed
off on. Otherwise, the case can be made that support for the rebel
programs are essential, admonishing the asset and personnel trained,
while claiming that they will be monitored. The case would be that
dubious groups have to be trained in the name of regime change in Syria,
a regime that has backing from Russia, China, and Iran.

A curious loophole in 18 USC 2339, which makes it illegal to provide
material support to terrorist organizations, is exception J which states
that:

No person may be prosecuted under this section in connection with the
term "personnel," "training," or "expert advice or assistance" if the
provision of that material support or resources to a foreign terrorist
organization was approved by the Secretary of State with the concurrence
of the Attorney General. The Secretary of State may not approve the
provision of any material support that may be used to carry out
terrorist activity (as defined in section 212(a)(3)(B)(iii) of the
Immigration and Nationality Act).

Exception J probably provides enough of a legal loophole for the CIA to
train terrorists once DOJ and the White House signed off on
paperwork carefully written by a team of lawyers.

The inter-agency mission given to 5th Special Forces Group
sees the Green Berets seconded to the CIA in which they act under Title
50 covert action authorities instead of Title 10 military authorities.
During such deployments, they also act in a compartmentalized manner to
the point that even the Colonel who commands 5th Group is not
read in on to the CIA missions. A Special Forces soldier at Fort
Campbell, Kentucky is assigned a position called S3X in which he is read
on to all of the missions and acts as coordinator. Special Forces
Groups are assigned to handle different regions around the world, and 5th
Group's area of operations is the Middle East making them the natural
choice for the training and equipping of rebel forces in Turkey and
Jordan.

*****

For the time being, the Special Forces soldiers assigned to carry out
Title 10 programs feel as if they have to make it look like they are
doing their job while actually doing nothing. With their hands tied
behind their backs, options are few and far between. Many are actively
sabotaging the programs by stalling and doing nothing, knowing that the
supposedly secular rebels they are expected to train are actually
al-Nusra terrorists.

Battlespace was delineated among the Special Forces members, with the
troops stationed in Amman in charge of southern Syria, and others
deployed to Turkey in charge of the north. However, Damascus X [the CIA
station once located in Syria, now in Amman, Jordan] maintained a
tremendous amount of clout over both commands. Gradually, funding and
weapons flowed into Jordan for the Green Berets to use to further their
mission.

*****

One Green Beret commented on the great living conditions they had. A
marble chow hall was built for them that employed a full-time cook.
"They always have sweets out, ice cream, a giant freezer with chocolate
milk, giant TVs, and an Xbox," he said. He also mentioned they had a
great gym. Between training rebel groups, they would take trips to see
the local attractions. All and all, not a bad deployment.

6) Internal military pressures as well
as media whitewashing attempted to censor SOFREP investigation details
and end soldiers' leaking to the media:

Since those articles
have been published, 5th Special Forces Group has held "sensing
sessions" between the commander and his staff. The 5th Group commander
has also conducted battalion briefs in which he stuck to the party line,
but never actually denied any of the charges made in the SOFREParticles
about what is going on in his unit. One 5th Group member reported that
the briefs were extremely awkward, especially when the commander told
them that he got them all ball caps which at that point felt like it was
compensation to the men for the mess he had gotten them in.

*****

The commander, Colonel Leahy, went on the record for the Washington Times saying, "No one knows how to work with rebels better than our Green Berets..."
However, the [Washington Times] article glosses over the complaints that Green Berets have madeabout the Timber Sycamore
program in which "moderate" rebels actually turn out to be Jihadists.The Special Forces men complain and drag their feet, refusing to train
the next generation of terrorists, but their words fall on deaf ears at
the CIA. The brass as Special Forces also seems uninterested in
challenging the CIA,and the only mission that is keeping their unit
relevant at the moment."

"Weapons shipped into Jordanby the Central Intelligence Agency and Saudi Arabia
intended for Syrian rebels have been systematically stolen by Jordanian
intelligence operatives and sold to arms merchants on the black market,
according to American and Jordanian officials.

Some of the stolen weapons were used in a shootingin November that killed two Americans and three others at a police training facility in Amman, F.B.I. officials believe after months of investigating the attack, according to people familiar with the investigation.

The
existence of the weapons theft, which ended only months ago after
complaints by the American and Saudi governments, is being reported for the first time after a joint investigation by The New York Times and Al
Jazeera.The theft, involving millions of dollars of weapons,highlights
the messy, unplanned consequences ofprograms to arm and train rebels —
the kind of program the C.I.A. and Pentagon have conducted for decades —
even after the Obama administration had hoped to keep the training
program in Jordan under tight control....

Investigators do not know
what became of most of them, but a disparate collection of groups,
including criminal networks and rural Jordanian tribes, use the arms
bazaars to build their arsenals. Weapons smugglers also buy weapons in
the arms bazaars to ship outside the country....

The
existence of the program is classified, as are all details about its
budget....The
training program is based in Jordan because of the country’s proximity
to the Syrian battlefields. From the beginning, the C.I.A. and the Arab
intelligence agencies relied on Jordanian security services to transport
the weapons, many bought in bulk in the Balkans and elsewhere around
Eastern Europe.

The
program is separate from one that the Pentagon set up to train rebels
to combat Islamic State fighters, rather than the Syrian military. That program was shut down after it managed to train only a handful of Syrian rebels.

Jordanian
and American officials described the weapons theft and subsequent
investigation on the condition of anonymity because the Syrian rebel
trainingis classified in the United Statesand is a government secret
in Jordan.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the United States has flooded Jordan
with moneyfor various counterterrorism programs. American and Jordanian
spies have run a joint counterterrorism center outside Amman, and a
secret prison in Jordan housed prisoners the C.I.A. captured in the
region....

In 2009, a Jordanian doctor —brought to the C.I.A. by a G.I.D. [Jordanian intelligence] officer
after the doctor said he had penetrated Al Qaeda’s leadership —turned out to be a double agent
and blew himself up at a remote base in Afghanistan.Seven C.I.A.
employees, as well as the G.I.D. officer,were killed in the attack....

By
late 2013, the C.I.A. was working directly with Saudi Arabia, the
United Arab Emirates and other nations to arm and train small groups of
rebels and send them across the border into Syria. The
specific motives behind the November shooting at the Amman police
training facilityremain uncertain, and it is unclear when the F.B.I.
will officially conclude its investigation.

Captain
Abu Zaid, the gunman, was killed almost immediately. His brother, Fadi
Abu Zaid, said in an interview that he still believed his brother was
innocent and that he had given no indications he was planning to carry
out the shooting."...

The
training programfor Syrian rebels trying to oust President Bashar
al-Assad is largely armed and funded by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. It
was launched in neighboring Jordan in 2013 and relies heavily on
Jordanian forces to transport weapons. The initiative, the report
clarified, is separate from the Pentagon’s now-defunct effort to train
Syrian rebels to take on the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq (ISIS).

Jordanian
officials told the news organizations that a group of [alleged US "friends"] Jordanian
intelligence operatives siphoned off truckloads of weapons before
delivering them to their intended destinations.

After complaints
from the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, several dozen Jordanian intelligence
officers were reportedly arrested and fired from their posts but were
able to keep pensions and money they made from the scheme."